Yes, I took a rather restricted view.
I was talking (and thinking) about the bus transactions, not machine
language (or some even higher language constructs).
Johnny
der Mouse wrote:
> [top-posting damage repaired manually -dM]
>
>
>>>>You don't need locked bus cycles for atomic operations which
>>>>actually are atomic on the bus.
>>>>A write is a write is a write. It can never be split. It's
>>>>atomic. Can't be anything else.
>>>
>>>What if it's doing a write across a page boundary, and the second
>>>page isn't there?
>>
>>How could it do that? A write is a write is a write.
>
>
> Not quite. First, on an architecture that does unaligned accesses, a
> write at the machine-language level can turn into something
> significantly more complicated at the bus level. Second....
>
>
>>One write is one bus cycle. It's always aligned, and the full width
>>of the bus.
>
>
> ...you have a remarkably restricted view of how memory systems operate.
>
>
>>Otherwise we're talking about the CPU doing a non-aligned write,
>>which is a read-modify-write.
>
>
> Which can be, depending on the CPU and in some cases the surrounding
> electronics. It could also be a bus write cycle with only certain byte
> lanes enabled. It could probably also be other things, if, for
> examnple, the memory subsystem uses a narrower bus than the write width
> (eg, a 68k or i386 doing a 32-bit write in a system with a 16-bit
> memory bus).
>
> /~\ The ASCII der Mouse
> \ / Ribbon Campaign
> X Against HTML mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol